Silicon Valley vs. Families

In the late ’90s, I was an executive at an Internet start-up, and was spending most of my time working on the company’s effort to go public. It was a similar long-hours, hard-partying culture as that described in Silicon Valley.

No one seemed concerned that the quality of the work produced declined precipitously with the amount of hours that people worked. That was particularly true of the young investment bankers we were working with.

Combine that with the vast management literature indicating that better decisions come out of diverse groups, and it surprises me that anything of value can come out of Silicon Valley given both the hours that are expected and the dominant young white male culture that excludes even white men who have children.